- Lady Bracknell: Are your parents living?
- Jack Worthing: I have lost both my parents.
- Lady Bracknell: To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
- Jack Worthing: Algy, you don't suppose that Gwendolyn will become like her mother - in about one hundred and fifty years, do you?
- Algernon Moncrieff: All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.
- Lady Bracknell: Do you smoke?
- Jack Worthing: Well yes, I must admit I smoke.
- Lady Bracknell: I'm glad to hear it. A man should have an occupation of some kind.
- Lady Bracknell: Thirty-five is an attractive age. London is full of women of the highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.
- Cecily Cardew: When I see a spade, I call it a spade.
- Gwendolyn Fairfax: I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade.
- Gwendolyn Fairfax: I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
- Lady Bracknell: I would strongly advise you, Mr. Worthing, to try and acquire some relations as soon as possible, and to make a definite effort to produce at any rate one parent, of either sex, before the season is quite over.
- Jack Worthing: Well, I don't see how I could possibly manage to do that, Lady Bracknell. I can produce the hand-bag at any moment. It is in my dressing-room at home. I really think that should satisfy you, Lady Bracknell.
- Lady Bracknell: Me, sir! What has it to do with me? You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter - a girl brought up with the utmost care - to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel? Good morning, Mr. Worthing!
- Lady Bracknell: To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people an opportunity of finding out each other's characters before marriage, which I think is never advisable
- Lady Bracknell: Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit: touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.
- Canon Chasuble: Charity, dear Miss Prism, charity! None of us are perfect. I myself am peculiarly susceptible to draughts.
- Jack Worthing: I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we still had a few fools left.
- Algernon Moncreiff: We have.
- Jack Worthing: I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about?
- Algernon Moncreiff: The fools? Oh, about the clever people, of course.
- Jack Worthing: What fools!
- Gwendolyn Fairfax: There comes a time when speaking one's mind ceases to be a moral duty, it becomes a pleasure.
- Jack Worthing: You are quite perfect, Miss Fairfax.
- Gwendolyn Fairfax: Oh, I hope I am not that. It would leave no room for developments, and I intend to develop in many directions.
- Jack Worthing: Gwendolyn, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?
- Algernon Moncrieff: Oh! I am not really wicked at all, cousin Cecily. You mustn't think that I am wicked.
- Cecily Cardew: If you are not, then you have certainly have been deceiving us all in a very inexcusable manner. I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
- Cecily Cardew: Uncle Jack is sending you to Australia.
- Algernon Moncrieff: Australia? I'd sooner die.
- Cecily Cardew: Well, he said at dinner on Wednesday night that you would have to choose between this world, the next world, and Australia.
- Algernon Moncrieff: Oh. Well the reports I have of the next world and Australia are not particularly encouraging.
- Algernon Moncrieff: I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It's very romantic to be in love, but there's nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one might be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the whole excitement is over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
- Gwendolyn Fairfax: We live, as I hope you know, Mr. Worthing, in an age of ideals, and my ideal has always been to love someone of the name of Ernest. There is something in that name which inspires absolute confidence.
- Gwendolyn Fairfax: In an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind, it becomes a pleasure.